The Dip

Not to copy my friend's post...

But that's exactly what I'm doing.

The Dip is a (short) book by Seth Godin. It's short because, like a good self-improvement book should, it gets right to the point. It doesn't flirt with what it's trying to say. It just comes out and says “Hey, if you do this or this or this, your life will be better.”

Because of it's straightforward approach, it didn't take me long at all to “get it” and understand that I had to take the advice it was offering.

There were a couple things I really got from it, and these things are hugely important:

Be the best in the world.

Seek out difficulties.

Do what you're best at.

Quit as often as possible.

First, be the best in the world. If you aren't going to try to be the best in the world at whatever it is you're doing, you're wasting your time. The minute you say, “I'm happy with where I'm at,” you resign yourself to your current position and are pretty much just waiting for death at that point.

He doesn't define the world as the planet Earth. He defines it as whatever it is you want your world to be, it's adaptive. The best in your world could be your city, county, state, country, genre, product, or anything you want it to be. But the key is to strive to be the best at whatever it is.

The ability to define your own world, allows you to always be able to improve. When you reach your goal of being the best magician in the country, you can then reassess your goals to be the best in the state.

Because you make your goals manageable, you're able to engineer your own dips, which leads me to...

Seeking out difficulties. The idea here, is that difficulties, or The Dip as Seth calls it, is what sets apart the good from the great from the best.

The dip is where most people get stuck. They reach a point where a task is no longer producing the same good results as it was when you started and so they quit, because it's not fun and it's not producing what they want.

The good and great and best push through these difficulties. They are able to see past the dip to their goal and say, “If I give up now, I'll never reach my goal of being the best magician in the state and all the glory and title that goes with it and all these illusions will have gone to waste.” So, they push through.

So you know what these dips do to people. Big deal, anyone could have told you that accomplishing anything you want is going to be difficult.

But, not many people use these dips as an advantage. And that's exactly what it is. Every dip you reach is a filter. It sorts you out from the rest of the people trying to do the exact same thing and every time you make it through one of these filters, you set yourself apart from the rest of the world.

The key to using these dips is to expect them. “I know I'm going to have trouble sawing a woman in half when I get to that point, but I can't let that get me discouraged. When I get there, I'll be prepared to push through and saw that damn woman in half.”

How can you possibly be caught off guard when you're expecting something?

And because you're expecting something, you'll be subtly be preparing for that eventuality. Because you know that you'll have trouble sawing the woman in half, you'll be getting ready for it long before you ever make it there, making it much easier when you are actually ready to take on the task.

By seeking out these challenges, you prepare yourself for them unlike your competitors. You won't get bogged and discouraged when you hit the dip. As the author says, “You'll lean into it,” so that you'll get out of it as fast as possible.

Next is to do what you're best at. Pretty simple.

A lot of people don't though. They spread themselves too thin, trying to do a number of things they're good at. Thereby dooming themselves to mediocrity in every venture.

In The Dip, he uses an example about how a new CEO of GM came out with the new hard line of “If we're not number 1 or 2 in that division, we're shutting it down.”

But why would you cut something that's profitable? Because it's detracting from your most successful ventures. What little profit you're making is detracting from the possibilities in your better goals through time and effort.

Sure, you may be making a profit of three dollars with A and B, but if cutting B allows you to make four dollars with just A, doesn't it seem like that's the way to go?

Finally, quit as often as possible. This seems to contradict the idea of pushing through the dips. Don't give up, push through the difficulties!

It's not a matter of quitting when the going gets tough. It's a matter of recognizing what does and does not work and quitting what doesn't work.

Recognizing the dead ends in your goals for what they are, will prevent you from wasting a lot of time and effort and money. If your goal is to be the greatest theoretical physicist of all time, you have to recognize that goal for what it is.

That's something that can't necessarily be trained, like throwing a football. It's not something you can just realize you want to do, your mind had to being shaped for that sort of comprehension at a very young age.

Not that just anyone can train to be the world's best football player, but having the physical prowess for football could lead you in many directions. Whereas, having the mental prowess for physics, the options are a lot narrower.

So, when you decide your goals you have to take an honest look and question whether or not it's a venture you can really succeed at.

Likewise, when you get to a slow point, you have to ask yourself whether it's just a dip or if it could possibly be a dead end. Not “this is too hard, I don't want to,” but “I can't possibly go any further.” If it's the latter, you have to quit.

So that's what I picked up from the book. On Thursday, I'll talk about what decisions I've made because of what I've learned from The Dip.